Comment

Governments globally claim to base their policy responses to Covid-19 on science, on the advice of medical experts. But there has been a multiplicity of different opinions on the evidence, allowing governments to be politically selective in deciding what to do – even to ignore the basic thrust of the advice.

The full impact of the change of government nine weeks ago will be clear on Tuesday when the new parliament sits for the first time. It will be an acid test for the Albanese government. The test is one it has largely set for itself. Despite claiming it does not need the parliament to commit to its 43 per cent reduction goal by 2030, Labor has invested too much time and energy to brook an easy defeat.

Peter Dutton is calling for ‘civilised debate’ in Australia. On Sky News he complained that the current standard of public debate is ‘reprehensible’ and ‘unacceptable’. The opposition leader blames social media for the decline. I do not.

The concept of Australia becoming a renewable energy superpower should be a no-brainer. A clean-energy revolution is under way that will drive societies around the globe to a low-carbon existence. This will rival in significance the Industrial Revolution, which was driven by fossil fuels – coal-fired power, and petrol and diesel engines.

No one did more to shape the direction of Australian politics in the past decade than Tony Abbott. His ruthless and determined resistance to effective action on climate change was reprehensibly short-sighted but was the template for four election campaigns.

Boris Johnson has joined Donald Trump and Scott Morrison on the list of leaders who have lost office in the past two years. We can say with some confidence they were all a particular kind of Covid-19 fatality: their inability to manage the pandemic – both in terms of appearing to manage it as well as actually managing it – was the main reason the three of them went from victorious to vanquished in one election cycle.

One of the most disappointing aspects of our recent politics – at a tremendous cost to our national interest and wellbeing – has been the treatment of education as something of a political football. Such a fundamentally important policy area has been basically neglected, ignoring the reality of the system’s failures and the magnitude and urgency of the challenge to ‘fix it’.

It was the drum that alerted them to the political event unfolding on the grass between the old and new parliament buildings early on Saturday afternoon. A ‘freedom movement’ rally was under way. A hundred people gathered around a flatbed ute with a pleasant young female MC and PA system perched on top, conducting amplified chats with identities familiar to the crowd. This was the hard core of the ‘cookers’, as Canberrans call them.

Four years. Four million taxpayer dollars. More than a dozen judgements. Days and days in court – often in closed court, with the media and public barred from attending. On Thursday, it was finally over. The prosecution of Bernard Collaery came to an end.

While the climate debate intensifies over the inevitability of further, even more extreme weather events, and the necessary transitions to a low-carbon Australia, it seems that governments are ignoring or playing down the possibility of further pandemics and the need to be better prepared next time.